Facebook Wins $3 Million Spam Lawsuit against Power Ventures

After a nearly sixty month long court battle, Facebook has finally won $3 million indemnity from social-networking integration company Power Ventures, and its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Vachani, reported nakedsecurity.sophos.com on September 27, 2013.

Power Ventures allured users of Facebook in giving entrée to their contact lists and then spammed everybody with spam emails advising them to join their website, the now redundant power.com that aimed to combine content from social networks of users in one central machine.

They spammed emails to more than 60,000 targets with 'spoofed' header particulars gave the apparent look of coming from facebookmail.com, and asserted to be from The Facebook Team, in absolute infringement of US's Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, more popularly known as the CANSPAM Act.

The case which began in December 2008 had initially been decided in Facebook's favor on 16th February, 2012 in an order passed by 'Judge James Ware'. However, the case was shut on grounds of 'bankruptcy', filed by Power Ventures. However, with the dismissing of the bankruptcy filing by a new Judge US District 'Judge Lucy Koh', the case was reopened earlier this year.

On Wednesday 25th September, 2013, Facebook was rewarded $50 for each one of the 60,627 junk emails amounting to $3,031,350 in damages.

Such victory is accounted more as a moral victory than a monetary one. The order arrives with an unending ban against 'Steve Vachani' and 'Power Ventures' that their subsidiary or associated corporations can't engage in analogous activities and they have to exterminate scripts, software, and any other Facebook data which they acquired.

Valuewalk.com published report on 27th September, 2013 quoting denouncement of court's order by Steven Vachani, CEO of Power Ventures, as "Facebook has set a dangerous model for the future of user's rights to own and control their data, adding that the company will continue to fight this."

Allthingsd.com published a report quoting an expression of joy on the judgement by Craig Clark, Associate General Counsel for Facebook as "We are pleased with today's ruling awarding over $3 million in damages and injunctive relief and we will continue to enforce our rights against bad actors who try to harm Facebook and its members."